TO-Tech Blog

I haven’t picked up O’Reilly’s Windows Vista Annoyances book yet. But, since I spend a good chunk of my workday on a notebook running Windows Vista Business Edition, I probably should. In the meantime, here’s a link to a Slashdot review of the book:

Review: Windows Vista Annoyances

I run Vista on three different physical boxes (two notebooks and one desktop). They each have different graphic chip/card configurations. And, yet, I often see all kinds of weird display glitches (screen blanks out, switches from aero to basic, etc.) on each of them.

One of the improved features of Vista compared to earlier versions of Windows is the way it recovers from video driver panics. On older Windows boxes, this would result in a non-functional display that would require, at the least, a reboot.  Vista detects this and restarts the video subsystem without requiring a reboot. However, the real question is why Vista video drivers crash so much more than XP video drivers. I see the message in the figure above several times a week (if not even more often). This doesn’t leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling. Especially since I NEVER see this kind of problem when I use a computer running Linux (assuming X11 is running at all) or a Mac.

I read earlier this week that the so-called Windows 7 that will replace Vista may emerge as early as 2009. Honestly, this isn’t early enough for me. I generally like Vista and miss the program search feature when I use the Start Menu in XP. But, Vista’s glitchiness is annoying.

According to this ZDNet blog item…

Microsoft (finally) broadens Windows Vista virtualization rules

…Microsoft is going to formally announce that it is ok (license-wise) to install Microsoft Windows Home Basic and Home Premium Editions as Guest OSes on virtual machines. Home Basic and Home Premium cost less than the Business and Ultimate Editions. So, this is good news for those of us who need to run Vista in a virtualized environment for testing and other needs.

The official Microsoft press release on this topic is found at…

Microsoft Announces Vision and Strategy to Accelerate Virtualization Adoption

…and the pertinent paragraph is: Increased licensing flexibility with Windows Vista. For businesses, Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop provides unique licensing and flexibility to run Windows in virtual machines on servers and access them from either PCs or thin clients. The annual subscription to Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop is now an estimated retail price of $23 per desktop for rich clients covered by Software Assurance for Windows Client. For consumers, Windows Vista Home Basic and Windows Vista Home Premium are now licensed for use in a virtual machine environment, and the updated end-user license agreement is available at http://www.microsoft.com/about/legal/useterms/default.aspx.

Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion (Mac)/Workstation (PC) don’t seem to have issues with the current generation of Linux distros. But, Microsoft’s Virtual PC and Virtual Server do not, unfortunately. And, since most of my work is using Virtual Server, I’ve been spending a bit of time hunting for information and asking questions. Most of my information has come from reading Ben Armstrong’s (Microsoft Program Manager in the Virtual Machines group) blog. But, I haven’t seen all the information I’ve collected there and elsewhere collected in one place to help others trying to run current generation Red Hat Linux distro derivatives (RHEL5, Fedora, CentOS) under Virtual PC and Virtual Server. So, here’s what I’ve found so far to get these Red Hat based distros working. I’ve tested all these items using CentOS 5.1 and one or two using RHEL5 or Fedora. Make a backup of your working (or semi-working) VM/VHD before trying anything mentioned below.

• Degrade color depth from millions of colors (32-bit) to thousands of colors (24-bit). This is due to an issue with the S3 graphics chip emulation. If you need to make this change after the fact, use SSH to get to your odd looking (display-wise) VM and use system-config-display to change color depth from 24-bit to 16-bit. This change will be reflected in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
• Add the following kernel parameters:
• clocksource=pit (this is to help deal with the clock sync issue)
• i8042.noloop (this is to allow using a mouse in X windows) You can read more about this solution in this article this article and this Red Hat bug thread.
• If you need to apply the two kernel parameter changes after the fact, you can edit /boot/grub/menu.list and add both parameters to the kernel line

The clocksource option helps but does not entirely solve the clock drift issue. I end up having the clock resync with a time source once an hour as an added workaround. I hope this collection of findings help’s others run current generation Red Hat related distros under Virtual PC and Server.

Just read this headline over at the Consumerist…

Buyers Beware: Current Blu-ray Players Won’t Correctly Play Future Discs

Hope this is not true since I finally decided Blu-ray had won the HD disc war and was starting to look around for one to buy.